This invention relates to determining relationships in social networking systems and in particular to determining an unexpected relationship between a pair of friends of a user of a social networking system.
Social networking systems store social information provided by users including but not limited to hometown, current city, education history, employment history, photos, and events the user participated in the user's profile. Social networking systems allow users to create connections with friends and interact with each other. Social networking systems allow users to view other user's profile, organize events, and invite friends to participate in those events.
Users spend time in a social networking system viewing other users' profiles, pictures, and posts. Oftentimes, users find value in using a social networking system because they can obtain information and updates about their friends that would otherwise have been hard to obtain. For example, a user may have a friend that moved abroad. Using the social networking system, the user can find out about the friend's activities and see the friend's information, for example, view photos posted by the friend to the social networking system. A social networking system has large amount of information describing each user and the relationships among the users. But because there is so much information, certain useful information may be hidden or difficult to determine unless a user luckily happens upon a fact that is interesting to the user.